A Study On The Influence Of Organizational Learning Culture On Employee Job Satisfaction And Organizational Commitment

In the era of knowledge economy, the efficiency of knowledge acquisition, integration, application and creation determines the competitiveness of an enterprise. In an enterprise, knowledge creation and application are undertaken by its employees. The work attitudes of employees including job satisfaction and organizational commitment have a proven significant influence on their job performance, organizational citizenship behaviors and turnover intent, and in turn, influence the performance and competitiveness of the enterprise. Therefore, enterprises need to adopt effective measures to enhance their employees' job satisfaction and organizational commitment with a view to keeping them devoted to their work and loyal to the enterprise. A review of related literature indicates that most existing researches focus on the influence of personal attributes and job characteristics on job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and some researches have studied the influence of organizational factors such as organizational support, equity, organizational climate and organizational culture. However, few researches have explored the influence of organizational learning, in particular, organizational learning culture on job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Given the common wisdom that organizational learning culture, job satisfaction and organizational commitment of employees are all vital factors for an enterprise, an empirical proof of the connection between the three variables would be conducive to an integrated management of organizational learning culture and work attitudes. This study, therefore, finds it meaningful to explore the influence and influence mechanism of organizational learning culture on job satisfaction and organizational commitment of employees.On the basis of literature review and careful thinking, the author constructed a conceptual model hypothesizing the relationship between organizational learning culture, job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and tested the hypotheses and the conceptual model through an empirical study. The study, a cross-section research by nature, surveyed knowledge workers of domestic knowledge-intensive enterprises by using a self-report questionnaire. The large-sample survey generated 396 valid data sets. A series of analysis on the data were conducted by using such statistical analysis methods as exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, hierarchical regression analysis and structural equation modeling. The main research issues and results are stated as follows.(1) This study, on the basis of the existing literature, defined organizational learning culture, established an evaluation model and developed a localized questionnaire for organizational learning culture, and also tested the reliability and validity of the questionnaire in the Chinese research context through an empirical research. The result shows that in the research context of this study, the seven-dimension structure of organizational learning culture is valid and the seven-dimension questionnaire of organizational learning culture is of acceptable reliability and validity.(2) This study, on the basis of existing questionnaires, developed the questionnaires for overall job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and tested the reliability and validity of such questionnaires in the research context of this study. The results show that in the given research context, the overall job satisfaction has only one dimension and is of acceptable reliability and validity. The three-dimension structure of organizational commitment is valid, but some items of the organizational commitment questionnaire needs revision to be applied in the Chinese research context(3) This study established a conceptual model with organizational learning culture as the independent variable, job satisfaction as the mediating variable and organizational commitment as the dependent variable, and also controlled for gender, age, educational level, tenure, enterprise ownership and enterprise scale. The results show that in the given research context, the organizational learning culture of knowledge-intensive enterprises has a significant positive influence on job satisfaction of knowledge workers; the organizational learning culture of knowledge-intensive enterprises has a significant positive influence on organizational commitment of knowledge workers; Job satisfaction of knowledge workers has a significant positive influence on their organizational commitment; job satisfaction has a complete mediation effect between organizational learning culture and organizational commitment.This study tested the applicability of the seven-dimension model of organizational learning culture in the Chinese research context, and explored the outcome variables of organizational learning culture which have been rarely discussed in the existing literature. In addition, this study goes beyond the frequently discussed antecedents of employee attitudes such as salary, welfare and promotion, and explored the antecedents of job satisfaction and organizational commitment from the perspective of organizational learning- an organizational factor, which, the author hopes, can serve as a meaningful addition to the related literature.Through verifying the significant positive influence of organizational learning culture on job satisfaction and organizational commitment, this study proves that the development of organizational learning culture is a practice incorporating the interests of both knowledge workers and knowledge-intensive enterprises. Commitment to developing organizational learning culture can lead to improved job satisfaction and organizational commitment of knowledge worker, and in turn, improve performance of employees and the entire enterprise.